Patchwork Doodle.

Patchwork is one of my favorite two-player games, and is probably the forerunner of all of the polyomino (Tetris shapes) games that have been flooding the market in the last year. Patchwork only plays two, and there’s very direct competition for the game pieces, each of which is unique, you use to fill out your 9×9 board, as well as specific rewards on a progress track that also serves as a sort of timer to restrict the length of the game. Designer Uwe Rosenberg has since created a line of polyomino games in the same vein as Patchwork, but that allow up to four players and run longer, including Cottage Garden and Indian Summer, while he experimented with mechanics like how players select their tiles; they’re good, but Patchwork is still the king.

This year saw Rosenberg bring out two new flip-and-write titles in this subgenre, Patchwork Doodle from Asmodee imprint Lookout games and Second Chance from Stronghold. I have both and have played Patchwork Doodle a bunch of times already; it does a solid job of bringing part of the Patchwork experience to more players (the box says “1 to 6+,” but the maximum is really ten players), but the game is also very streamlined and there’s zero player interaction, so it’s more of a brand extension than a sequel or a reimplementation.

This is a flip-and-write game, which means there’s a core deck of cards, and players will use those cards to write on their individual scoresheets. Each player here gets a sheet with a blank 9×9 grid, and gets one of ten unique start cards (which is why I say you can play with up to ten people), each of which shows a shape that will cover seven squares. You can fill in that shape anywhere on your board – I tend to do it somewhere in the middle, as placing it on an edge risks creating some hard-to-fill areas right out of the chute – before players take their first turn. The game itself comprises three rounds, and players will get to fill in eighteen more shapes across those rounds, scoring after each round, and possibly using any or all of their four special powers across the game.

The cards show more polyomino shapes, as you’d expect, although this time they’re not all unique. You start the game by flipping the top eight cads from the deck and creating a circle, placing the start token anywhere on that circle, and then having one player roll the die to move the token. The die lets you move the token 1, 2, or 3 spaces on to a card, which all players then get to fill in on their grids, after which the card is removed from the game. You do this six times in a round, after which you stop to score, saving the two unused cards to start the next round, when you’ll draw six fresh cards to bring the circle back to eight. In the last round, you’ll stop after the fifth card is used, and every player can choose one of the three remaining cards to fill in on their grid for their final move.

Some example cards and player sheets

Players also have single-use powers they can bust out at their discretion over the course of the game. One lets you fill in a single square rather than using the card for that move. One lets you choose to use either card adjacent to the one with the token on it, whether one space ahead or one behind. One lets you make one straight-line cut to the polyomino shape on the card into exactly two shape, after which you fill in one of those shapes (but not both) on your grid. The last power just lets you reuse one of the three powers you’ve already used.

Scoring is a little confusing at first, although everyone I’ve played with got it after a round or two. When a round ends, you identify any completed rectangle on your grid, and then score one point for every space in the largest square inside that rectangle, plus one more point for every row outside the square. So if you had a 4×6 rectangle completed already, you would score 18 points: 16 for the 4×4 square, plus 2 for the additional rows that were in the rectangle but not the square. It’s just not intuitive, but the way the game plays out, it starts to make sense both for strategy and from a design perspective – the scoring absolutely affects where you choose to place your shapes.

After the last round, you score the largest square inside your chosen rectangle, then subtract one point for every space you didn’t fill in at all over the course of the game. You add up your three scores from the rounds, subtract that penalty, and that’s your final score. Games take 20-25 minutes, really depending on how quickly players choose which areas to fill.

There is zero player interaction here, which is true for most roll- or flip-and-write games, but you aren’t even competing in game-end scoring categories like in games like Welcome To; Patchwork Doodle is very much a solitaire game where you compete at the end of the game. Also, the box comes with six colored pencils that are kind of useless, so I recommend you gather your own before playing. It’s very portable – I just took it on vacation with my girlfriend, only to have her trounce me by filling in all but 5 squares on her grid – and easy to pick up once you grasp that square-in-rectangle scoring, but I would still suggest the original Patchwork if you’re going to play with two people.